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Catastrophe: Risk and response by Richard Posner

2 March 2005

By Martin Ince

RICHARD POSNER is a US judge, a law academic and a thoughtful writer. In Catastrophe he asks the big question&colon; why is nobody willing to pay to save the world from disaster. Voters and policymakers do not understand science. The key organisations are stuck in the past, like the US Air Force, which cannot give up its obsession with fighter planes to save us from asteroids. And big hazards are ignored, such as the chance of a new particle accelerator destroying the universe. This would be a &dollar;600 trillion shame – Posner proves that this is the financial cost of the extinction …